The present invention relates to a web site support system, and more particularly to a web site support system that monitors online user sessions.
A web page in a web site, whether an Intranet or Internet site, is generated by a web server. The web servers used at the inception of the Internet rendered static web pages, i.e., the entire content of an individual web page was simply retrieved from a non-volatile storage. Thus, the content of the static web page was the same for each user. More recent web servers generate web pages dynamically, i.e., the content of a web page is assembled “on-the-fly” at the time the web page is accessed. Thus, the content of a dynamically generated web page can vary from user to user and can depend upon user input, user preferences, user profiles, and the like.
Some web site systems include a monitoring subsystem that enables a web site operator to review online user activity. A typical monitoring subsystem generates a log of page hits, i.e., a list that includes the universal resource locator (URL) for each web page visited by each user. This log is stored in a non-volatile storage. The log can be reviewed and filtered by the web site operator to summarize user activity. For example, the web site operator can determine the number of hits on a particular web page. As another example, the web site operator can extract a user session, i.e., a list of the URLs visited by a particular user, from the log.